Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."
Quotationfrom Martin Niemöller on display in the Permanent Exhibition of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Niemöller was a Lutheran
minister and early Nazi supporter who was later imprisoned for opposing
Hitler's regime.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Martin Niemöller
(1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an
outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of
Nazi rule in concentration camps.
Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation: (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an
outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of
Nazi rule in concentration camps.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The quotation stems from Niemöller's lectures during the early
postwar period. Different versions of the quotation exist. These can be
attributed to the fact that Niemöller spoke extemporaneously and in a
number of settings. Much controversy surrounds the content of the poem
as it has been printed in varying forms, referring to diverse groups
such as Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Trade Unionists, or
Communists depending upon the version. Nonetheless his point was that
Germans—in particular, he believed, the leaders of the Protestant
churches—had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi
imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people.
Only in 1963, in a West German television interview, did Niemöller
acknowledge and make a statement of regret about his own antisemitism
(see Gerlach, 2000, p. 47). Nonetheless, Martin Niemöller was one of the
earliest Germans to talk publicly about broader complicity in the
Holocaust and guilt for what had happened to the Jews. In his book Über die deutsche Schuld, Not und Hoffnung
(published in English as Of Guilt and Hope)—which appeared in January
1946—Niemöller wrote: "Thus, whenever I chance to meet a Jew known to me
before, then, as a Christian, I cannot but tell him: 'Dear Friend, I
stand in front of you, but we can not get together, for there is guilt
between us. I have sinned and my people has sinned against thy people
and against thyself.'"
Further Reading
James Bentley, Martin Niemöller: 1892–1984 (NY: Macmillan Free Press, 1984).
Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (NY: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
